Happy Birthday, Lewis Carroll

by Wendy Murray

Today is the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -- better known as Lewis Carroll -- born on January 27, 1832. He is best known for his classic fantasy novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (late 1871).

A writer, logician, photographer, mathematician and Anglican, Dodgson was mentored in his writing by his friend and fellow fantasy-writer, the esteemed George MacDonald (who strongly influenced C. S. Lewis), who read Dodgson's unfinished manuscript of the first book and encouraged him to try and get it published. In 1865 MacMillan released Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under Dodgson's pen name Lewis Carroll.

Charles Dodgson,
 a.k.a. Lewis Carroll

Often overlooked in the 'Alice' corpus is Carroll's classic "nonsense poem," Jabberwocky, which is found in Through the Looking-Glass. In the story Alice has found herself in a backward world on the other side of a looking glass when she finds a book written with illegible symbols. (Go here to see a creative rendition of this.) She realizes that, to read it, she must see it through the reflection of a mirror (being on the other side of a looking glass). When she does so, she ends up as confounded as before:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
      Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
      And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
      He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
      And the mome raths outgrabe.

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Despite the mysterious word choice, Alice intuits that the poem tells an exciting story with adventure and suspense. She concludes:

'It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's rather hard to understand!'  . . . 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate.'

Advice to Writers from a Modern Classic: William Langewiesche

By Wendy Murray

William Langewiesche, best-selling author, international correspondent for Vanity Fair, and (it so happens) a pilot,  won the rare honor of being chosen by the editors of Penguin Modern Classics (U.K.) to publish a volume of his writings about flight, thus joining the ranks of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Albert Camus,  Italo Calvino, Capote, Steinbeck and Gandhi.

Titled Aloft  (Feb 2010), Penguin chose the topic of flight from Langewiesche’s writing corpus because, says PMC-U.K. editor Helen Conford, “William possesses a unique perspective on flight and his writing is almost poetic in the way it captures the first century of flight.” It is “a rare event” that a living writer should be numbered among other classic (deceased) authors.  “PMC publishes only those authors whose writing they believe will be recognized in a hundred years’ time,” says Conford.

Langewiesche's approach to writing is a matter of "connecting the dots," getting on the ground, sniffing out the story, "going from Point A to Point B, and taking as long as it takes."

“I could write about anything,” he says.  We were sharing a meal at a pub and he points to a red bucket perched slightly to the left outside the door. “I could write a story about that red bucket. Why is it red? What is its diameter? Why does it carry two parallel ridges around its circumference? What is its metallic composition? Tin? Who made it? Why does he make buckets? Is he a peasant-tycoon--you know, a regular guy who doesn’t give a shit about superficiality? They get to the inner essence of things--the stuff you find in junkyards.”

On another occasion I overheard him giving writing advice to his assistant by phone.

On using the first person:
“If first person relates to what you are feeling, drop it out. No one’s concerned about you. Use the first person naturally, but never about yourself.”

On length:
“You’re not going too long. Go long. Make it 30,000 words. We’ll cut it later. Go long. Go long. Just tell the story. Grab the reader by the balls."

On fact-checkers
“Forget the brackets. Why burden the reader with the fact-checker neurosis? I don’t write for fact-checkers."

About his writing process:

I'm a writer. Even when I was a pilot I was a writer. I read an enormous amount of material on what I'm working on but I never take notes on what I read. I don't even underline anymore. I just read and allow myself to forget what is naturally forgotten and remember what I remember. I feel no obligation to cite anything. I like my prose unburdened with apparatus. I take relatively few notes. I listen carefully. I like to use a recorder because it adds the ability to revisit things in a way taking notes doesn't. It's not a crutch, though it's a pain in the ass. I also prefer to do my own research. It makes my work less encyclopedic.

The American version of Aloft,  available at Amazon, etc.

I see writing as highly tactile, like sculpting, forming something, smoothing it with hand strokes. Where before there was nothing, in the end there is a sculpture, an object. Occasionally it doesn't happen that way, either because of my own inability or because I don't have the right subject matter. You can get stuck with an overly linear, overly complex, overly generalized text—all kinds of overlys—that can screw up the aesthetic of a piece. At the same time, I hate aesthetics for aesthetics sake. That is a form of masturbation. Rule number one in writing is Don't Insult the Reader. It's a great insult to a reader to waste reading time. You have this very precious relationship with each reader, and that reader is probably smarter than I am.

Best of the Week, Dec 31 - Jan 5

In case you missed our postings last week, here are the highlights. Happy New Year!

8 Lessons Learned About Social Media as Your Workplace:  Keep going; slow and steady wins the race. Millions compete for internet space. Stay on point; don't freak out. Good content always prevails. . .

Tea with Frederick Buechner: He says, "It was John Updike who said God saves his deepest silence for his saints. Some people might say, 'The hell with it.' His silence throws me back upon myself and I must search my own depths. I'm still searching, aren't you?" He bobs his tea bag. "If we're not searching, we're dead" . . .

The Plaintive Faith of T.S. Eliot: 
. . . No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

Charlotte Brontë's Unmet Longing

Charlotte Brontë’s signature melancholy narrative voice in Jane Eyre belies a hidden hopefulness she once exerted, if only briefly.

Her longings came into stark clarity when a little-known story she had written in French at the age of 25 emerged in Belgium long after her death. Titled L’Ingratitude, the story was written for her tutor, a married man with whom Bronte had become infatuated. It was unknown for many decades following her death and was published for the first time in Feb 2012. (Her novel Villette is said to be based upon it.) In it her love was unrequited.

Her despair and general melancholy is matched by the losses she incurred in her short life:

•     Her mother, Maria Brontë, died in 1821: Charlotte was 5
•     Her oldest sister, Maria, died in 1825 (age 12): Charlotte was 9
•     Her next sister, Elizabeth died a month later (age 11): Still 9
•     Her brother Patrick died (age 29) in 1848: Charlotte was 32.
•     Her sister Emily (of Wuthering Heights) died the same year (age 29)
•     Her younger sister Anne, died in 1849 (age 27): Charlotte, 33.

(The Brontë sisters from left; Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte.)

Her first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell (who knew her) wrote:

"I am struck afresh by the absence of hope, which formed such a strong characteristic in Charlotte … . Miss Bronte never dared to allow herself to look forward with hope … . She had no confidence in the future; and I though, when I heard of the sorrowful years she passed through, that it had been this pressure of grief which had crushed all the buoyancy of expectation out of her."                          The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë kept faith, though she was unsentimental. She did what she needed to do to reconcile life’s ravages with the possibility of hope.

She died at the age of 38 in 1855.

Listen to Gillian Anderson read L'Ingratitude.

How Letters and Gratitude Saved a Grieving Soul

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”  -- C.S. Lewis

As his wife, Joy Davidman, slowly faded from this world succumbing to cancer, Lewis remembered the kindness of others who helped him along the way. He not only remembered, he wrote to tell them so.

C.S. Lewis wrote to Sister Madeleva: Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sister Madeleva thanking her for kind words extended to him regarding the health of his wife. 

From the Treasures of the Catholic Resource Reseach Alliance